


Prismatic

by apparitionism



Series: Dynamics [4]
Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ballet, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-22
Updated: 2014-07-22
Packaged: 2018-02-09 21:47:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1999059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apparitionism/pseuds/apparitionism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Myka designs the costumes and Helena wears them... but that doesn't always go smoothly. Also, Myka has a family... and that doesn't always go smoothly either.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prismatic

**Author's Note:**

> So over on tumblr, amatterofcomplication made another [ballet manip](http://amatterofcomplication.tumblr.com/post/92193712121). Of which I said, I gotta fic that somehow. Also, deathtodickens made another [impossibly sweet doodle](http://deathtodickens.tumblr.com/post/92270855000/bering-wells-and-the-endless-ballet-because). And further, doctoratomic got into the act with[lovely manips](http://doctoratomic.tumblr.com/post/92349170073/so-i-just-discovered-ballet-au-and-lo-and-behold) too. Basically, this ballet AU is all the crazy and wonderful things. Finally, and of course, for the real-deal fic that will not be surpassed, go see [Roadie](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Roadie/pseuds/Roadie).

Tracy Bering knows that a telephone call from her sister generally means one thing: Myka has a problem. Not always a big problem. Sometimes it’s “Do you remember when we lived in that apartment in the huge building when we were really little? What was our cat’s name?” (Dickens.) But once it was “I need to tell you something, and I need you to tell me if I can ever tell Mom, because it’s pretty clear I can never tell Dad.” (Actually you can tell them both. Because I’m not at all surprised, and they won’t be either.) And then, once, it was “I don’t know how to ask Helena to marry me.” (Really not a problem if you know the words “will you marry me,” sis.)

She has taken to saying “What is it this time?” whenever her phone lets her know that Myka’s calling, and Myka says, on cue, “I am not that bad.”

Tracy understands why her sister does this to her; indeed, why a lot of the people she knows do this. She designs sets and productions, but her work is less design and more… something like instinct. One of the things she has always been able to do is to create the right kind of space, the right _conditions_ , for things to happen. She’s always been the one to do it in their family. She could broker peace, or she could set up the bowling pins for an argument.

Myka has said to her, “You should have been the engineer, not me,” but while Tracy had wanted to get away—their father really was demanding and overbearing and all the unkind things theater people said about him, though he was other things too—she hadn’t wanted to get away nearly as desperately, or as far, as Myka had. Tracy had just needed a few steps to the side. Which made it all the more ironic that Myka was the one who’d circled back around—not only to putting clothes on dancers, but also even to _marrying_ one very soon.

Marrying the one, in fact, whom their father had used to try to make Myka return to costuming dancers in the first place.

Tracy had wondered why he’d been so insistent that Myka spend that years-ago summer as Helena Wells’s dresser, but it took her quite some time to make him admit that he’d sabotaged her costumes _on purpose_ just so Myka could fix them.

“Pretty awful plan, Dad,” Tracy had said. “Kind of mean to the ballerina, plus I don’t see Myka anywhere around here, do I?”

Their father had—has—always been very good at making Myka want to run away.

So when Myka calls and says, “I need Dad to back off this wedding,” Tracy says she’ll see what she can do. She actually likes it when Myka is around, when their family is more like a family than a collection of armed camps… and their father seems to like it too.

Tracy tells him, “You made this whole thing happen in the first place, Dad.”

“So my plan wasn’t so awful,” he says in triumph.

“I guess not. But if you don’t let Myka have the wedding she wants, you’re going to have to come up with a whole new plan, because she’ll be gone again.”

“But Myka has no idea how to put a production together!”

“Maybe not,” Tracy concedes, “but I do.”

Tracy does wish, in the occasional resentful moment, that Myka had just asked her to put the wedding production together in the first place. But Myka doesn’t think of her as someone who can do that. Their father is Myka’s colleague—resented, but even so. Tracy is just her sister.

****

Helena is dancing Odette/Odile in _Swan_ _Lake_ ; it is the second time she has done so. Myka has designed the costumes for her last three roles, but not for this production… though Myka has not been able to keep herself from readjusting Helena’s costumes a time or two, prior to rehearsal—“Just to, you know, make sure that nothing’s wrong,” Myka says, ducking her head, speaking very quietly so the company assembled below will not hear her, as if she should be _ashamed_ somehow that she cares about Helena—Helena feels that to allow someone else’s creations (their far inferior creations) to clothe her body is tantamount to an act of infidelity. Almost always, she comes home after a performance determined to prove her continued faithful love to Myka in as many adrenaline-fueled ways as she can.

“I’m not complaining,” Myka tells her as they lie together, “but why does _Swan_ _Lake_ get you going like this?”

“ _Swan_ _Lake_ doesn’t ‘get me going,’” Helena protests.

“How can you not remember when you first danced it? My god, I have never been so exhausted in my entire—”

“We were about to be married! First, you were exhausted from wedding planning and being angry at your father, but second, and more importantly, I could have been dancing the Crocodile in a Peter Pan panto for all it would have mattered.”

“So you’re saying that _now_ you need _Swan Lake_ to get you going.”

“We’ll just see if anything ever gets me going again.” She turns over in a comical huff.

“We _will_ see,” Myka says to her back… her beautiful back, with its perfectly defined trapezii, then those lovely shoulders, capped with just enough sinewy deltoid to move her arms so precisely… “or rather, _you_ will, because I’m guessing that when you see what I’m planning to put on you in _La Sylphide_ …”

That is the next production on which they will work together, and Myka knows that Helena is going to be avid to dance in what she is working on… the sylphs are to be streamlined creatures, as if they really could fly elementally through the air. Helena hates having to wear anything resembling a tutu, and Myka will be dressing her—if what she is working on, with its vertical panels and discreetly dynamic wings, comes to fruition—as the sleekest of sylphs.

“Hm,” Helena says, but she isn’t angry, Myka can tell. “You just like putting things on me so you can take them off.”

“It took you this long to figure that out?”

“Well, I’m no engineer.”

****

“Myka, I am dancing _Swan Lake_ ,” Helena says. “We are still rehearsing every single day harder than I ever have in my life, and thus I do not have time to play referee for you and your father’s arguments about our wedding!”

“Why do you have to be dancing it _now_?” Myka knows she sounds about five years old, but Helena _isn’t_ paying attention to the details, and for some reason her father _is_.

“Because, my love, no one from the ballet consulted me during scheduling to inquire when precisely I would be changing my name to Bering-Wells and how best that could be accommodated by _an entire dance company_. You should feel lucky that the run ends before the day you chose for the ceremony.”

“I could have changed it! You told me not to change it, because you told me it wouldn’t be a problem!”

“It isn’t a problem for _me_. Your father isn’t bothering _me_.”

“He will when it’s time for you to put that wedding dress on.”

“But that time is not yet now,” Helena says. “Now, I’m bothered by the fact that you’re thinking about him. Instead of me. Instead of my dancing _Swan Lake_. Or rather, my having just danced _Swan Lake_ and needing to be distracted from thinking about whatever minimal flaws I’m going to have to address in rehearsal tomorrow.” She smiles in that way she does, and Myka knows she’s about to find herself distracted by a very distracting woman who is, it’s true, dancing the role of her life to date, and dancing it magically well, and if she doesn’t want to think about wedding details because she’s still physically energized even though the performance ended an hour ago… Helena’s pulling Myka’s glasses from her irritated face, and she’s kissing the irritation away, and they haven’t even been together for a year yet, and they’re going to get married in a month, and Myka is starting to think that _Swan Lake_ is actually not a bad thing to be thinking about, after all, and maybe Helena should really focus on that, and on distracting Myka…

So the next day she calls her sister. “I need Dad to back off this wedding,” she tells Tracy.

And Myka has no idea how Tracy does it, but she works some kind of magic, and their father starts to see things Myka’s way. Or at least, he starts to see things in ways that he and Myka can both agree on, for she will say one thing, he will say another, and Tracy will say, “Yes, but don’t you think _so much_ tulle would seem a little dated?” He will agree, and Myka will say that she doesn’t absolutely hate tulle, and suddenly, there will be middle ground.

The wedding, in the end, is something enchanted. And Myka starts to think that her sister might be too.

****

Helena is of course happy to be dancing _Swan Lake_ for this second time, but now she can think about it, now that she is something other than a novice desperate to get it something like right. And in a world that is decades post-Bourne, she feels that _something_ should be more interesting about the production. She voices this complaint to Myka, as they sit beside each other in bed—no performance tonight. Myka’s glasses are creeping down the bridge of her nose, as they do, and she is scowling at her notebook.

Myka says, and to Helena’s ears she sounds completely offhand, “If he can do all-male, or mostly male, I think somebody should do all-female. As if it were underwater, maybe—dolphins, or beluga whales. The black swan can be an orca.”

“You’d costume that beautifully,” Helena tells her, “though I think most women would have trouble with the lifts. I know I would.”

“Yeah,” Myka says. Helena can tell from the way her pen is moving across the page that she’s thinking about, that she’s trying to solve, the problem of the scarf.

Myka is working on the _La Sylphide_ costumes. The most important element is the scarf that will bind the wings of the sylph—Helena—in the second act.

She has shown herself to have little trouble with, and has even laughed over, costuming Steve and Liam. Steve is to dance James, who falls in love with the sylph; Liam will dance Gurn, his best friend. The story takes place in Scotland, and the director is adamant that they will wear the traditional kilts. Helena is charmed by the idea of the two of them in kilts, but she does feel bad for them. The director has also asked that the kilts be somewhat difficult to dance in, so that even the famously effortless Steve will need to show effort, exertion. 

The kilts are practically the only traditional elements of the production. The famous former principal Vanessa Calder, who was the most famous Sylphide of her generation, will reprise her late-career shift to playing the witch Madge (there are whispers from those who say she is too old, that she will drag the production down, but her body still obeys her, and Myka is costuming her with great care). This production will twist the story somewhat, which is why Myka is feeling double the weight on that scarf. As in all productions, Madge wants to see the winged sylph bound and killed with it, but in most versions of the story, her motivation is that she has been offended by James and wants to make him suffer. The twist here: Madge wishes the sylph this fate out of jealousy—for Madge was once both a sylph herself and this sylph’s lover.

“It’s a lot for one scarf to have to say,” Myka complains. “Plus you have to die in it, or because of it, and I don’t like the symbolism.”

“I have to die all the time,” Helena points out. “It’s the ballet, for heaven’s sake. In what other occupation would I die so often?”

“Opera singer,” Myka says immediately.

“Then be thankful I didn’t choose that.”

“You can’t sing.”

“You always fixate on details.”

“I’m an _engineer_.”

“I know,” Helena says, completely indulgently. “Come here, _engineer_.”

****

When Myka calls Tracy and says, “I can’t make a scarf to kill Helena with,” Tracy is pretty sure that what she’s really saying is, “help me solve the problem of making a scarf to kill Helena with.” And presumably she means as part of a costume, but Tracy’s always found it helpful, with Myka, to make absolutely sure that everybody knows what’s being said.

“For a ballet,” Tracy says.

Myka sighs. “No, for real life. Because in the time since we were at your place last Thursday, I’ve decided I can’t stand her anymore.”

“How should I know? Maybe you were just putting on a really good act, and you _can’t_ stand her anymore.”

“I want to put on a really good act. A really good second act. That’s why I need a scarf. It’s for _La Sylphide_.”

And now Tracy is pretty sure that Myka wants her to talk to their father again.

“That isn’t even a challenge,” she tells Myka. “Dad will know what to do. You really should just call him yourself.”

“Dad won’t know what to do; Dad would wrap her up in some big piece of cloth. It’d be an incredible piece of cloth, but… that’s not what I want, but right now it’s all I can see. Just talk to me about scarves and killing, and I swear if you say Isadora Duncan…”

Tracy hears Helena in the background saying a teasing “Isadora Duncan!” more than once.

“Maybe for real life,” Myka concedes.

“How are the sylphs overall?” Tracy asks.

“Pretty smooth. Actually, really smooth. They’re kind of like bats. Or really unruffled owls.”

Tracy considers bats and owls. She says, “Well, if you want them to stop doing what they’re doing, you don’t wrap their wings up in some big, beautiful piece of cloth. Dad doesn’t think small, but maybe you should.”

Myka snaps her fingers; Tracy hears it through the phone. She says, “You really can’t wonder anymore why I do this all the time.”

“Do what?” Tracy asks.

“Ask you for your help.”

Tracy likes the way that finger-snap sounded.

****

“Take your glasses off and go to sleep,” Helena tells Myka. She is in her nightshirt, leaning against the bathroom door, about to come to bed. Myka is propped up on pillows in bed, pen in hand again.  
  
“I’m trying to _get this_. Tracy gave me the beginning of an idea, but I can’t quite get it.”

“Get it tomorrow. Or better yet, get Tracy to give you the full idea. Pay her for it. You really should, you know; she doesn’t come cheap as a designer.”

“She’s my sister!”

“I honestly don’t understand why the two of you don’t work together.”

“It’s the ballet. She hates the ballet.”

“Well, so did you, supposedly, and look at you now. Married to a prima ballerina.” Helena whips through one fouetté. “You should really take your glasses off and start taking advantage of that.”

“You should put your own glasses _on_. You can’t even see me from over there, can you?”

“All the more reason for me to get much closer to you—well, assuming I can find you—and for other things to happen.”

“Other things,” Myka says. “Waitaminute. Other things. This crazy production is full of that kind of thing. So, glasses, but not glasses. Owls, and think small, and not glasses, but definitely other things—got it. Got it.” She scribbles furiously.

Helena comes to the bed, slides in beside her.

Myka pulls a pillow up, regards it, then practically tears the case off. She folds it rather haphazardly into a long strip. “You can do a lot of things with a scarf,” she says.

“That’s true,” Helena allows.

Myka takes her glasses off, raises the pillowcase to her eyes, and ties it behind her head. “Owls. If I take away your sight, you can’t hunt, can you, you sylph. Why would you even want to fly? You can’t see your prey. You can’t see anything. Or anybody… certainly not some dumb guy who dissed a witch who used to love you. And the best thing for the show? Your whole body’s still at your disposal.”

Helena has no idea if the director will go for this. Probably so, because it’s Myka’s idea, but… more importantly, Myka’s glasses are off, she is exhilarated, and she has blindfolded herself. This, Helena thinks, quite conveniently puts _Myka’s_ whole body at _her_ disposal. She thinks, for a brief second, that she’ll have to remember to thank Tracy.

****

Myka calls Tracy.

“What is it this time?” Tracy asks.

Myka says, “Whether I am that bad is not the issue this time. It’s whether you are still that bad, or still feel that bad.”

“What in the world are you talking about?”

“I know you never touch ballet, but I’m your sister, so I’m the director’s envoy. They want to do an all-female _Swan Lake_ set underwater—well, not really underwater; it’s not being staged at Sea World—and I’m working on costuming an extremely vain little prima as both an orca and a beluga whale, so you can imagine how that’s going. I said there was probably only one person in the world who could design an underwater set for _Swan Lake_ that would make all the creatives, including me and that vain little prima, happy, so here’s the problem: can you design the sets for an all-female _Swan Lake_ that takes place underwater and has a dolphin chorus?”

Tracy says, “I thought you’d never ask.”

END


End file.
